I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on people using AI to build alternatives to Adobe’s creative apps. What could this mean for photographers, especially those of us shooting macro? Would you trust an app built with AI to edit your images or handle focus stacking? Would your decision come down to how it was created, or the quality of its results? And where do you think the legal boundaries are? Could recreating features lead to lawsuits, or does it depend on whether someone copies code, branding or the interface? I’ve used AI to create a focus-stacking app myself, which got me wondering how far I could take it. Could I build a video-editing app too? What’s stopping more of us from creating tools tailored to our own workflows? Would you try an AI-built alternative, or stick with established software? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences! 🔍

After seeing all the fantastic images on the challenge last week It gave me the inspiration to give it a go, I wanted to try out the in camera focus stacking on my R6 which didn't go very well so resorted to single shot, where the focus stacking needs auto focus I resorted to using a 12mm extension tube with my old ef 24-105 L lens, I did a couple of stacks with different apertures the takeaways were 1. should of used a timer 2. should of found a better subject, the image came out but had a lot of haloing which I assume was from the camera shake. I needed to find a better background but the most important one would be to give myself more time to play and look at the scene. The first image was a 15 image stack set to 4 increments. The second image is the single shot which I lit with a torch as I left the small rig light at work, I opted for shooting at F4 for this one to remove more of the distractions from the background.

Well, I do seem to be trying a lot of new things! This time it's in-camera triple exposure photography featuring a Chinese Praying Mantis (Tenodera sinensis), and a thing called Intentional Camera Movement , or ICM. ICM photography is where you move or vibrate the camera slightly during a long-ish exposure. Rather than ruining the picture (although it sure does that sometimes), ICM often produces surprisingly beautiful effects. So here we have a picture of the mantis, combined with two separate ICM pictures of nearby weeds. The individual single exposures are also kept in camera so I could use the same mantis picture over and over as I experimented with ICM on the weeds. It took a LOT of tries with different lengths of exposure and amounts of ICM to get to where the final picture started to look like the first picture, which as always is the picture that we have in our head. 📍 Eastern Michigan, USA 📷 Canon 4D9 (DSLR, full frame) 🔎 Canon 100mm f/2.8L Macro and Canon 50mm f/2.8 💡 Canon flash Home -rolled diffuser 🩸Fun fact: This is the same mantis that I featured here for double exposures recently.

Found this technique quite interesting to play with. This is to create an impression, not reality.

Is the Godox ringflash ML 150 II Macro reliable and useful or underpowered? - I need to use something as a frontal fill-in? Any feedback is appreciated. thank you.